The Dickey Pitch

R. A. Dickey’s second consecutive one-hitter for the Mets last night—a 5-0 blanking of the Orioles, which came on the heels of his 9-1 win last Wednesday against the Rays—was a feat unmatched in the National League in sixty-eight years. Only ten other pitchers since 1900 have ever done such a thing, which makes Dickey’s rows of ohs more rare than the two perfect games already produced in major-league play this year. He’s been numbing, no less, and watching him in action, or sort of—he’s a knuckleballer—you feel some of the game’s lost silences falling around you. He works quickly and with increasing effect, and enemy batters, heading back to their dugout after another feeble infield bouncer or another strikeout, look like folks anxious to forget today’s Dow. His 11-1 won-lost record to date, his 2.00 earned-run average, and his hundred and three strikeouts are all the best in his league, and—to switch to an ancient, vintnerish measurement of pitching quality—his combined sixty-seven hits and twenty-one walks surrendered come out a country mile below his ninety-nine innings pitched.

That skimpy walks total is close to inexplicable. Knuckleballers prop the ball on their fingertips before launching, and its frozen, spinless aspect as it approaches the plate abruptly shifts to a veer or sail at the last moment, in a direction mysterious to batter and pitcher alike. With knuckleballers, high counts, foul balls, walks, and hours proliferate, while action and interest sag. Describing the phenomenon, Phil Niekro, the Hall of Fame knuckleballer, once said to me, “For me, it’s hunt and peck all year long.” But Dickey now apparently has control of his knuckleball not only within the strike zone but, amazingly, within sectors of it; its little dart reminds you of a running back making his first move beyond the line of scrimmage. No one has yet explained the fresh technique or the meaning of all this, and Dickey isn’t saying anything, either. “I’m gonna leave it to you guys to explain it,” he said in the clubhouse last night.

Dickey, whose full beard and peaceable appearance suggest a retired up-country hunting dog, is thirty-seven years old, with ten years and three prior big-league teams behind him, and hard work has brought him to this Shangri-La, perhaps only briefly. He’ll hope for another visit on Sunday, against the Yankees. Watching him, if you’ve ever played ball, you may find yourself remembering the exact moment in your early teens when you were first able to see a fraction of movement in a ball you’d flung, and sensed a magical kinship with the ball and what you’d just done together. This is where Dickey is right now, and for him the horrendous din of the game and its perpetual, distracting flow of replay and statistics and expertise and P.R. and money and expectation and fatigue have perhaps dimmed, leaving him still in touch with the elegant and, for now, perfectly recallable and repeatable movements of his body and shoulders and the feel of the thing on his fingertips.

Roger Angell, a senior editor and a staff writer, has contributed to The New Yorker since 1944, and became a fiction editor in 1956.